Undergraduates help shape the future of sustainable aircraft fuels

We're part of the E2E program. It stands for English to Engineering. That program is composed of five smaller undergraduate research teams, and we all share the common goal of furthering sustainable propulsion in the aerospace industry. So this is the SAF team. SAF stands for sustainable aerospace fuels. What we're looking at is how do the SAFs on the market, particularly HEFA-SPK, which is our most popular SAF right now. How do they work in traditional jet infrastructure and can they be drop in? Drop in means that a fuel can be basically dumped into an engine and they don't have to change any of the mechanisms. The main goal of this year specifically is to look at the interaction between the sustainable aviation fuel and the O rings and how that might be different than regular jet fuel. Basically to see, can we use normal HEFA-SPK, which is the sustainable aviation fuel, on current engines without the O rings breaking down or losing their performance. Two years ago, we found that the specific O rings we tested, which were Buna-N O rings, were quite reactive to the fuel. We're finding this year that that's not quite the case. With these Viton O rings, which are different compound. The sustainable aviation fuel O rings react a lot more similarly to the Jet A O rings than we thought. We like to call this program something that is vertically integrated, which means that we build off of each semester, and we develop our students to stay with the program throughout their undergrad years. I think it's cool that undergrads get the opportunity to lead a team, choose what they want to do, and publish a paper. To be involved in a sustainable aviation research group has really been eye opening and made me realize that is really what I want to do, and it's been very fun to be a part of this group in the past three years.